venture to say, to exercise such a potent influence on the public opinion of the country as should make it impossible for the State to regard social questions with any other eyes than those of the Church, or to acquiesce any longer in the divorce of practical religion and village citizenship.

THE CREED OF CHRISTIAN

SOCIALISM.1

"And many, hearing Jesus, were astonished, saying, ‘Is not this the carpenter ?' .. And Pilate said unto Jesus, 'Art Thou a king, then?'"-MARK vi. 3, and JOHN Xviii. 37.

A

think!

CARPENTER or a king? Which was He?
A workman or a leader of men?
Let us

The Divine Founder of our religion, the great Head of our Church, is known in the sacred records, and has been designated from time to time in the long history of Christian society, by many names and many titles.

Is there any true sense in which it is right for you and me, without irreverence, to speak of Jesus Christ as the greatest of social emancipators, the most potent of social Reformers? I think so.

Every king and leader of men is enshrined for us in his own age. Indeed, you will always find, I think, that the best history of any age is to be found in the biography of its hero or greatest man.

1 Preached before the University of Harvard in Appleton Chapel, Sunday, January 7, 1900.

The golden age of classic Greece you will better understand if you think of it as the age of Pericles; the majesty of Imperial Rome when you think of it as the age of Augustus; the era of Italian Renascence when you connect it with the thought of Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo or Raphael; the epoch of the Protestant Reformation when you speak of it as the times of Luther and Erasmus, and Colet and More.

But when we come to speak of the King of the kings of men, the Flos Regum of the heroes of humanity, of what special age is He the measure? The Christ has for His times all times. Not the first century only, nor the second, nor the twelfth, nor the sixteenth, nor the nineteenth, is the age of Christ. "The present days are His days, and we are His contemporaries."

But when we try to picture His personality, how do we think of Him? Have we-you and I, Churchmen of the nineteenth century-any different picture of the Christ in our imaginations from that of the Christians of the first century, or the fifth, or the twelfth ?

It would be strange if we had not. For certainly, not only the strictly theological, but the imaginative conception of the personality of the Christ has varied greatly from age to age. You can see that this is so nowhere more vividly than in the history of Christian Art.

As you gaze upon the earliest Christian pictures, in the Roman catacombs, you cannot fail to re

cognise that the conception of Christ which was conveyed to the simple minds of the men of the second and third century by the gay and winsome figure of the Good Shepherd, with the happy sheep nestling on His shoulder, with the pastoral pipes in His hand, blooming in immortal youth, must be very different from that of the men of a later age, for whom the gracious and gentle Pastor has given place to the crucified Sufferer, depicted in countless aspects of misery and woe, from the gaunt and ghastly Crucifixes and Pietas and Entombments of the early Florentines, to the sublime dignities of Michael Angelo and Tintoret and Coreggio.

Nor, again, can you help feeling that the conceptions of Christ's personality conveyed to the Italian Churchmen of the Middle Ages by the numberless pictures of the Madonna and Child, unfailing in their sweet and gentle lessons of the divinity of childhood and of mother's love, must be far different from that conveyed to the Flemish Christians of the fourteenth century by such a picture as the Van Eyck's "Worship of the Immaculate Lamb," with its sublime figure of the omnipotent Christ, the King in glory, enthroned and crowned, with hands outstretched in royal priestly benediction of the world.

Now, looked at from this point of view, what should you say was the special aspect of the person of Christ most characteristic of our age? Fifty years ago I think it would have been difficult to decide.

But to-day I think there can be no doubt that largely due to the more directly historical interest awakened by various foreign studies of Christ's life from a merely biographical point of view, and largely inspired in our own country and Church I do not hesitate to say, by the spiritual beauty of the figure of Christ as represented by the Unitarian Christian, Dr. Channing, and still more largely perhaps by the conception of the office and character of Christ as the federal Head of humanity, the King and Consummator of society, and of the doctrine of the Incarnation as the consecration of all human life, instilled into the whole of modern theology by my own revered Cambridge teacher, Frederick Denison Maurice, we have learned to worship a more human Christ-kingly and Divine still, it is true-commanding our reverence and devotion and humility, but still full of human friendliness and sympathy and love-a Divine comrade, not

"Too bright and good for human nature's daily food,"

ever ready to help and guide us through the endless moral perplexities of everyday commonplace existence, ever ready also to illuminate for us by some far-reaching principle the difficult modern. problems of history and politics and science, of poetry and art, of trade and labour.

Let us go back and feel once more, if we can, the significance of that life manifested in Nazareth all those years ago.